Google's voice assistant is officially bilingual

Google Assistant is growing more powerful by the day.

The voice assistant can now understand two languages at once, helping it to fit more seamlessly in the growing number of bilingual homes. Google unveiled the new feature at Berlin's IFA Tech Show on Thursday, and the company says all Assistants worldwide are now polyglots.

The device has constantly picked up new languages, adding Swedish and Dutch over the summer, but it was previously only able to understand one language at a time. Now, it'll be able to keep up as bilingual people bounce between languages — provided they're speaking English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, or Japanese, and only two of those languages at a time.

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While bilingual families easily transition from one language to another, Google has spent years teaching its Assistant to do the same. As the company spelled out in a blog post, the update forces Google's algorithm to recognize what language is being spoken before it can process the request. This process gets complicated, so users have to specify which two languages they want their Google Assistant to understand.

Trilingual people and those who speak a language not on the list will just have to wait for Google Assistant to unpack another dictionary. In the meantime, read more about the update here.